Confession
Pat Wang
Winner of the 2021 Editors’ Award
Sept 2021
after K-Ming Chang & Precious Arinze
I. In my dreams, father is sending me prayers. Thin and faded, they hang themselves across my bed like skeletons holding hands. He tells me to listen to their songs, curl my body like confession in the mouths of saints. They will come for me soon. For my throat now caged and thorned. I undress before the hollowing flame. I stare at the jagged window pane and pray to forget the inevitable: the transformation from wretch to retch, the unbecoming of a body: bent over, heaving against something that was once mine. II. I only know how to exist in silence. I don’t yet know man but I know man handled. Boy erased like a heart scrubbed clean. No one asks to become a prophecy, blessed and prewritten. So I axe. I saw. I wrench like my body confessing in the sheets. Too much elegy and never enough memory. Stop the prayers. I refuse to mourn something not yet dead. Mangled memories creep back into my throat, tasting of blood and gall. They swing me open and punch out all the locks. Another strike. A final deluge. Fantasy tears open. I emerge like acid rain falling upon the Earth. III. In the solitude, I learn to lean my head back, dip into the vertigo again and again, searching for a place where double vision doubles over into fields of hidden heroes and blooming ghosts, all beautiful as boys. I want to scream and echo across the star-dappled night. Imagine me more mortal than martyr. How I would burrow into the bible and spit the words back into Truth’s mouth: acrid and untouched. I’m sorry. I’ll do better. This is not the cross I die on. And as doubt perfumes the air, I escape like a son leaving a tomb. Shivering, still, born again as the sky splits into a blaze of violet. I press down on my tongue just to know I’m whole once more and again, I remind myself to speak is the body’s only way of coming home.
Pat Wang is from Atlanta, Georgia and studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.